Utagawa Hiroshige II

Utagawa Hiroshige II (二代目歌川広重, 1826-1869), born Suzuki Chinpei (鈴木鎮平), was the chief pupil and adopted heir of Utagawa Hiroshige I. He inherited his master's name in 1858, sustained the meisho-e (famous-views) landscape genre through the closing years of the Tokugawa shogunate and the first years of the Meiji Restoration, and produced — under three successive names (Shigenobu, Hiroshige II, and Risshō) — a body of landscape, Yokohama-e, and Edo views that occupies an unusually difficult attributional space between two of the most heavily collected names in nineteenth-century Japanese printmaking.

Born in Edo in 1826, Chinpei entered the studio of Andō Hiroshige (1797-1858) in the 1840s and received the artist name Shigenobu (重宣), drawn by long Utagawa convention from his master's own go. Working in the Hiroshige studio he produced landscapes, fan prints, surimono, and book illustrations through the 1850s, closely modeled on his master's idiom of long horizontal vistas, gradated bokashi skies, and quietly populated road and harbor scenes. By the mid-1850s he was being entrusted with finishing parts of his master's late designs, a working relationship that complicates the attribution of a number of late Hiroshige I-signed prints: scholars now reassign some sheets of the famous One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei, 1856-1859), in particular several finished after the master's death in the ninth month of 1858, to Shigenobu's hand.

When Hiroshige I died of cholera in 1858, Shigenobu married his master's daughter Otatsu (お辰) and was permitted to succeed to his go, becoming Utagawa Hiroshige II. The new Hiroshige signed prints with the master's name, used the toshidama (jewel-of-the-year) cartouche of the Utagawa school, and inherited Hiroshige I's relationships with major Edo publishers. His most consequential project under the new name was Shokoku meisho hyakkei (諸国名所百景, One Hundred Famous Views of the Provinces), issued in 1859-1861 by the publisher Uoya Eikichi. The series surveyed celebrated sites across the Japanese provinces — Etchū's Mount Tate, the whaling station at Gotō, the harbor of foreign ships at Nagasaki, Niigata, Yoshino, Kishū, Yamato, Echigo — in the tall, narrow ōban tate-e format that Hiroshige I had used so effectively in the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Hiroshige II's compositions are characteristically vertical, dominated by a single dramatic motif (a bridge, a waterfall, a wave, a temple gate) thrust into the foreground while the famous view spreads behind.

The second Hiroshige's career was also shaped by the new pressures of the Bakumatsu years. After the opening of Yokohama in 1859, he became one of the leading designers of Yokohama-e — the genre depicting the foreign settlement and its American, British, French, Dutch, and Russian inhabitants — producing ambitious triptychs such as The Interior of the Gankirō in Yokohama (1860) and A Picture of Prosperity: America (Amerika shin no zu, 1861), which place the new mercantile city and an imagined American capital in the visual language of Edo meisho-e. His Yokohama-e are among the founding documents of a brief but historically vital genre that registered, in print form, the political and commercial transformation of late Tokugawa Japan.